*Speaker: Giacomo Vivanti (G)
*Location:
*Date: 00/00/00
G:
Hello, my name is Giacomo Vivanti, I’m a psychologist and a researcher at
the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre and the Victorian Autism Specific Early
Learning and Care Centre here at La Trobe University and today I want to share with
you some of our recent research on how children with autism learn and how we can
improve the learning outcomes using innovative treatment approaches.
Now autism is a very puzzling disorder. Unlike typically developing children,
children affected by autism are more inclined to engage in activities that involve
objects rather than activities that involve people however people with autism often
have exceptional talents, for example this is a drawing by a person with autism and
you can notice the perfection of the proportions, the attention to the details, this is just
a detail of the drawing that you saw before. But then when we look at the adult
outcomes of individuals with autism we find that very sadly autism affects the ability
to live an adult independent life perhaps more than any other neurodevelopmental
disorder. In fact many individuals with autism fail to learn the communication skills,
the socialisation skills and the daily living skills that are necessary to live
independently, to find and maintain a job, to have friends and to have a social life.
So our question when we started this research program was very simple, how do we
change that? Given the potential that individuals with autism have there must be a
way to change that. The first step was really to understand why is it difficult for
children with autism to learn things and our initial hypothesis was that difficulties in
doing things by themselves that we see in adults with autism might be related to
difficulties in doing things with others when children with autism are very young and
so we looked at very early learning processes and we focused on imitation. Imitation
is a very important learning tool, spontaneous imitation promotes a sense of social,
emotional affiliations with other people, when we imitate others we feel a bond with
the person we are imitating and it’s a very important tool to learn new knowledge and
it starts very early in development. And what we found is that what is distinctive
about young children with autism is a diminished inclination to imitate others. They
can imitate others on demand but they don’t imitate others very often spontaneously
so they have the ability but they don’t have a spontaneous propensity to imitate other
people.
We also found other factors that were found to negatively impact learning including a
low inclination for functional play, again not the ability but a spontaneous propensity
to do so. So the next question was if we increase the spontaneous motivation to
imitate others and to play is this going to improve their learning outcomes? Within the
group of children with autism that we studied we found that children who were
imitating more often, they were doing better in terms of their learning outcomes so
maybe if we increase this spontaneous motivation or inclination to imitate and play
this is going to affect their learning abilities and their learning outcomes. The next
question was how do we do that in the first place?
Transcribed by audio.net.au
1
Now one treatment approach that seemed to be very relevant to these early learning
processes which we have identified, it’s called the Early Star Denver Model and it
was developed in the United States by Sally Rogers and her colleagues at University
of California where I used to do my postdoc. This program is based on fostering
spontaneous imitation and play skills as well as communication and other skills. What
is interesting about this model is that it’s about spontaneous play, spontaneous
communication, spontaneous imitation so in this approach you don’t tell the child
what to do, you follow the child’s lead and you build learning opportunities based on
the child’s motivation and spontaneous inclinations.
So it seemed to be ideal to target these early difficulties however this program, the
way it’s described in this paper, involved very intensive individual one-to-one home
treatment by trained clinicians so it’s effective but it’s not feasible, it’s not
sustainable, you can’t do it to many children with autism. And so our big fat and crazy
idea was to turn this treatment approach into a childcare program. Most children with
ASD, which is autism spectrum disorder, in Australia are enrolled in childcare
programs so we thought maybe we can train regular childcare teachers and staff and
we can implement this treatment approach into community childcares. So we trained a
group of teachers, regular childcare teachers in this model, we incorporated the results
of our research so that the knowledge from our research about the mechanisms that
seem to prevent learning was part of the curricular activities and we enrolled a group
of 30 pre-schoolers with an autism spectrum disorder in this program. As you can see
in this picture rather than a one-to-one model which was what was used in the original
study we adapted this approach to the resources available in a typical childcare setting
to make it feasible, to make it sustainable.
Now when we started this program the majority of the children enrolled did not have
any language or communication and would not imitate others spontaneously and
would not engage in peer play like this girl, Vanessa ... that’s not her real name ...
who was enrolled in the program when she was only 18 months old. We followed
these children for one year and after one year we compared the outcomes of the 30
children to the outcomes of 30 peers with autism who had the same age, received the
same amount of treatment but it was a generic intervention program, it was not based
on following the child’s lead or increasing spontaneous motivation or spontaneous
inclination to imitate, play and communicate.
And what you can see in this picture if you look at the top table, what you see is their
cognitive level at the beginning of the treatment, the two groups were very similar but
then in the group enrolled in our program at La Trobe, children had improvement in
their cognitive level which was twice as much as the children in the control group.
Similar in the bottom graph you see their receptive language level, their ability to
understand other people’s communication which is a key factor in cognitive
development. We found that again the two groups were very similar at the beginning
but after one year of receiving our program children enrolled in our program at La
Trobe improved twice as much as the children in the control group. And in this slide
you can also see Vanessa now, in this picture we’re having a conversation where
she’s telling me about how she celebrated her birthday with her friends and her
language and cognitive level now is in the normal range, is indistinguishable from that
of a typically developing child.
Transcribed by audio.net.au
2
Now what is the next step? The next step is to support dissemination of this program
across a range of preschool settings including mainstream childcare programs so that
children with autism across the country can learn from their typically developing
peers in mainstream childcare settings that are already available, that are already there
so that they can express their full potential, we really want to aim high for these
children. Thank you for listening.
End of recoding
Transcribed by audio.net.au
3